#1: Some kind of amazing free content. A blog. Photos. Drawings. Interviews. A podcast. A webshow. Videos. An online magazine. Not behind a paywall. Not quadruple-triple-opt-in.

#2: A badass website. Yes, my friends design and usability matter. Show me someone that says “Looks don’t matter!” and I will show you a liar 🙂

#3: A subject matter other people give a crap about and are willing to spend money on. Your passion is organic pig farming advice for pig farmers in southern Spain. Awesome…your total potential fans/customers are probably two people and they have .04 cents to spend (or like 1/10th of a Euro or something). Other people have to care about your subject matter and buy products/services related to it or your passion will be wasted. You might want to try The Today Show Test.

#4:Actually knowing your stuff (captain obvious!). Being passionate isn’t enough by itself. You gotta know what the heck you are talking about. How do you go about that? Read. Watch. Listen. Do. Find the leaders in your space. Learn from them. Develop your own opinions, thoughts and teachings. Keep going. Never stop learning.

#6: Building relationships with everyone in your space. You gotta know the players and the players gotta know you. The bloggers. The media sources. The influencers. The authors. The product creators. How do you get to know them? Here are four of many ways: 1. Get off your butt and get to events they are at and meet them (shocking!). 2. Buy their products and services and give them some love. 3. Talk about them on your blog/web show, etc. and promote them (and then tell them about it!). 4. Interview them.

#8: A list of people who know, like and trust you. Cliche? Yes. Overlooked ridiculously often, yes. I’m going to put this all in CAPS. YOUR EMAIL LIST & YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PEOPLE ON YOUR EMAIL LIST IS THE #1 LONG TERM KEY TO SUCCESS. If you aren’t building SPECIFICALLY an email list and working on that relationship, start right now. Literally right now. Please? Pretty please? Trust me on this.

#9: Systems. I know…borrrinnnnnggggggg, right? Maybe. But, super important. Do you have systems in place for handling media requests? How about customer service? Emails, etc.? Write your own rules, but make sure you write them or you might drive yourself nuts.

#10: Personal touches and showing your personality. Some people are going to love your personality. Some people aren’t. That is fine. And that is the way it should be. Play to the people that love you and don’t be afraid to show your true self. The people that monetize their passions online show who they are. The good, the bad, ugly. Own it.

#11: You gotta work your butt off. This isn’t about overnight success. This isn’t about some magic software that does it for you. You gotta work and be patiently impatient (know what I’m saying?). In the word of Chris Farrell, it is simple…not easy.

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I think what is very often overlooked is #3, a subject matter that people are willing to spend money on.

This doesn’t mean your passion can’t be monetized but if you are trying to sell coaching to people who are broke, yes they might need it, but you aren’t going to go very far.

Another way of looking at that is offering great free content (like you do here with i/v) and then monetizing from corporations.

It’s all about the business model people, get that right, the blog, the tweets, the social media will take care of itself. Well, almost 🙂

David Siteman Garland

Absolutely, John. Great point.

rhys ludlow

I have to agree . I had the top internet radio station for Chinese pop music ((with English track info) and could not figure out how to reliably monetize it. The royalties are enormous and I was not not interested in making news as the first American prosecuted for copyright infringement by Chinese record companies.

How do you think this all applies to news sites or entertainment sites? Say you’re not selling knowledge persay but aggregating newsworthy content of any popular category, entertainment, videos, etc whatever?

Are people willing to spend money on news? not sure…

David Siteman Garland

My honest opinion? No, people don’t want to spend money on news specifically. But there might be things related to the news that can be monetized.

You should add a #12: All the ingredients listed above are optional. In other words, there are no rules.

Everything you have listed above can (and is being) be violated and the web is full of examples.

Decent guidelines though.

D

David Siteman Garland

Agree there are no rules, however, after studying hundreds of people who have done this successfully, are ethical, happy, etc. they *normally* DO have these 11 things in common (or at least most of them).

There are of course unethical sleezy d-bags making $ online as well, but who would want to be one of them, you know?

Shelia

Totally agree David. Great points. Also feel that you must be willing to recognize issues and be willing to make quick changes when needed. That’s the beauty in small business.

David! After I purchased CAOC I implemented everything I learned and had a $3,000 launch which was life changing. As uber excited as I was about that I soon scaled up to an $84,000 launch. Since then I’ve practiced the same CAOC system every time and now have six figure launches (just closed on a $614,000 launch!). How is that even possible?!?